


Not of God, But of You

by MrProphet



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-26
Updated: 2017-04-26
Packaged: 2018-10-24 07:14:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10736778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrProphet/pseuds/MrProphet





	Not of God, But of You

Amy Kawalsky was not, by strict habit, a regular churchgoer. A military life made doing anything on a regular basis difficult, and although her parents and three of her brothers remained devout enough to require the Air Force to give them Sunday mornings off to attend Catholic mass, she had long since lapsed and felt it would be hypocritical to do so. Despite her departure from orthodoxy however, she held to her faith. She still said her prayers, made thorough if irregular confession and attended mass when she was free to do so. The former she did most regularly, as the latter two activities required her to be not only off duty but on Earth; working in outer space did not make religious observance any easier.

When she worshipped it was at St Joan's, a little Catholic Church in her neighbourhood. The building was a mock-Gothic structure fashioned from imported stone, adorned with medieval stained glass rescued from a condemned East German church. A low, brick building housed St Joan's beautiful Lady Chapel, and the church even had its own relic. Amy liked the Old World feeling of the church, which would have been more in keeping with a European small town – or at least an old neighbourhood of New York – than with a working class district of Colorado Springs. She liked the priest as well, an earnest but forgiving young Dominican named Father Mike.

Father Mike took confessions on Tuesdays and Fridays as a matter of course and the queues were almost always huge. The area was a melting pot for Italians, Poles and Hispanics, all staunchly Catholic, and St Joan's and her sister churches did good business. Father Mike was however prepared to receive the odd sinner for drop-in confession in the rest of the week – so long as they did not blab about it – and Amy felt confident she qualified as St Joan's' oddest sinner. She was scrupulously honest with her confessor, and while she never mentioned Stargates or aliens by name, Father Mike no doubt realised that her work was more exotic than analysing deep space radar telemetry. Her superiors might have been shocked by how much she gave out, but Amy had absolute faith in the seal of the confessional.

After all; a girl had to believe in something.

 

One bright autumn morning with a crisp chill in the air, Amy strolled along the road from her apartment block to St Joan's. It was Wednesday and she was going to confession. She had in fact been free the past two Tuesdays, but it had been over three months since her last confession and she did not wish to hold up the line of other parishioners and feel under pressure to rush her back-catalogue of violence and impure thoughts. When she felt under pressure she forgot things, and she always felt bad being absolved when she had missed anything off the list.

Sometimes she wondered what Father Mike really made of her, behind his clerical calm. What did a quiet parish priest – a monk no less – whose flock brought him no worse than lust and covetousness make of a woman who regularly confessed to the taking of life alongside her minor blasphemies.

As she entered the church, Amy saw a man kneeling before the table which held the candles for the dead. Four candles had been freshly lit, but although the man's attitude was one of respectful reverence, he was not praying. Amy approached him on silent feet, crossing herself as she entered the holy space. She lit her own candle, knelt beside the man and whispered a short prayer before speaking to him.

"Well, this adds one more to my lustful thoughts count," she admitted. "I didn't know you were a Catholic?"

"I'm not," Daniel replied, sombrely. "I just…I was looking for something to do to remember and this seemed to be an idea."

"Who are you remembering?" Amy asked, gently. "Too many for your parents; not enough for the Abydos mission."

"It's not important," Daniel lied. "This is a nice church."

"Isn't it," Amy agreed, allowing the change of subject. "Has Father Mike shown you the finger?"

"No," Daniel replied. "He's been very understanding."

"Not _that_ finger," Amy said, with a gentle laugh. "Come with me." She stood and crossed herself again.

Daniel just stood. "Where are we going?" He asked.

"How long have you been coming here?"

"Four years."

"Four years and you've never explored the place?" Amy asked, disbelieving. "That's not my Daniel."

"I only come here once a year," Daniel replied, defensively.

"Sorry," Amy said, chastened.

Daniel sighed. " _I'm_ sorry. I didn't mean to snap at you."

Amy smiled, reassuringly, to show there was no offence. She led him to the back of the church and up a small, concealed staircase to a chamber behind the altar. The only light fell through a stained glass window, showing a woman in armour, a saintly corona around her head, burning at the stake with her hands clasped in an attitude of prayer.

"Joan of Arc," Daniel realised.

"From a shrine in France originally," Amy explained. "But that's not what I want to show you. Turn around."

Daniel obeyed. Opposite the window was a glass case, and within the case a battered wooden chest, bound and inlaid with gold and studded with jewels. The casket stood open and was lined with velvet; nestled in the velvet lay a broken sword and a small gold clip, the latter holding a small, yellowed piece of bone.

"So what am I looking at?" Daniel asked, crouching before the case.

Amy knelt and said a brief prayer before answering with a question of her own. "What do you see?"

Daniel smiled at the challenge. "Fifteenth-century Florentine reliquary casket; inlaid decoration depicting scenes from the Gospels. Or rather," he added, shrewdly, "a seventeenth century Parisian copy, and a very good one at that, although some of the decoration has been prised off for sale over the years and replaced with gilt tin and jeweller's glass."

"How can you possibly know that without opening the glass?" Amy asked, awestruck.

"Toolmarks," Daniel replied. "The casket was made by a master artisan – you can tell it's a copy by his maker's mark, not because he made mistakes – whoever made the replacements was not as skilled. You can see the joins and scratches around several of the jewel settings. The sword is eighteenth century. French cavalry sabre; not army issue, custom made. Expensive. The break is ragged and very near the hilt; it looks like the sword shattered where it was struck by another, but that wouldn't seem likely given its quality. It looks like someone went to the trouble of collecting all of the pieces," he added. "The clip is either original fifteenth century or one of the best copies I've ever seen. The bone is a finger joint, old but well-preserved. The assemblage is more recent than the parts; nineteen-hundred at the earliest."

"How…?"

"Age of the velvet," Daniel explained. "It might have been replaced but I took a chance.

Amy shook her head. "I'll never be as good as you are," she complained.

"But you can hit a bull's-eye at ranges where I miss the target."

"True," Amy admitted.

"So I did well?"

"Very well," Amy commended. "This lot was put together at the founding of this church in 1922. They bought the reliquary for three times its value and in its current condition on the misapprehension that it was the genuine article."

"What about our relics here?"

"Well, the sword belonged to a French mercenary named Etienne de Rais, who claimed descent from the infamous Gilles de Rais."

"Bluebeard?"

"The very same," Amy agreed.

"Also champion of the French royal line, Marshall of France and guardian of Joan of Arc," Daniel added. "A man of many parts."

"Most of them belonging to other people."

"Yes; thank you for that image," Daniel said. "But anyway; Etienne?"

"Right. Etienne de Rais emigrated to the colonies to sell his skills. He married an woman from the English colonies and signed up with her people when they decided they didn't want to pay taxes to George III anymore. He died fighting for the Continental Army in Saratoga, at the age of forty-two, when his sword broke in his hand.

"Before he died – as the story goes – Etienne had time to receive the last rites on the battlefield. A French Dominican named Father Simon Courant was the only Catholic priest who could be found. Etienne insisted on giving the priest the broken pieces of his sword, and told him its secret. He unscrewed the hollow pommel and revealed that it held that clip, and the bone, which he claimed was the middle joint of the right index finger of Joan of Arc. He said that the bone was an heirloom of his family that had brought him much success in battle, but he had always known that it would lead him to an early and glorious death.

"Etienne told the priest that as he had no son to bear the burden after him – his wife had only borne daughters," she explained, openly contemptuous of Etienne's mediaeval values – "he wished its blessing to be bequeathed to his final cause. The bone was to be given to General Washington, to give him strength in battle. The priest agreed, but as he did not believe Washington to be a friend of the true faith, he betrayed de Rais and kept the relic; taking both the bone and the sword which had been its reliquary.

"Quite a little cult grew around the bone, and after Joan was canonised in 1920 the Dominicans received Papal approval to build a church as a home for the relic."

"And why Colorado Springs?"

"This is where de Rais' eldest daughter settled. The family got snippy when word of the theft leaked out, but the order agreed to buy a useless plot of land from them – at a greatly inflated price – to build the church, and here it is."

"That's…quite a story," Daniel said, clearly gripped in spite of his carefully maintained air of detachment and his continuing air of melancholy.

"You can find the strangest things just walking around your own neighbourhood," she told him. "Sometimes I wonder why we bother going to other planets. Who were the candles for."

Daniel smiled at her persistence. "Jack, Sam, Catherine and Colonel Hammond," he replied.

"Colonel…Oh," she gasped. "You mean from the other world?"

Daniel nodded. "They saved us all. It wasn't our Jack and Sam; not Teal'c and certainly not me that stopped Apophis. Not really. It was them. I asked them to take a chance and they laid down their lives for a…a fantasy. For a story I told them of a better world. On the word of a total stranger they died to save someone else's Earth." He shook his head in wonder. "I'd like to think that I'd have done the same in their shoes but…"

"You would have," Amy assured him.

"I don't know that," Daniel insisted. "God, I hope I never have to find out, but part of me wants to know: Could I do it? Could I give my life for a world that wasn't mine?"

Amy laid a hand on either side of Daniel's face and looked into his eyes. "I know you would," she said. "Although part of me wishes you wouldn't."

"Why?" Daniel asked.

Amy shook her head. "For a smart man, you can be pretty dense sometimes," she said, then kissed him gently on the cheek.

"Oh, yeah," Daniel said, blushing.

"I'm just scared that I'll be lighting a candle for you one day."

"Not for a long time yet," Daniel promised.

Amy smiled back at him, but weakly, a slight waver at the corner of her mouth.

"Hey," Daniel said, laying his hand on Amy's cheek. "You know, I've never seen you look so scared, Amy."

"I don't get scared for myself," she replied. "I'm a soldier. I don't want to die, but I've accepted it could happen. I don't want to lose you though. I don't want to have to deal with it."

"Well, relax," he said. "My death wish days are behind me. You're shaking," he noted. "Come on; Let's get out of here and I'll buy you a coffee."

Amy shook her head. "Maybe later. I really need to see Father Mike for my confession. I'm pretty backed-up," she added. "Could be a while."

"I guess we'll have to wait until I get back, then," Daniel said. "SG-1 ships out at five."

"Yeah; 11's got a go for a three day follow-up on the P2D-118 dig starting tomorrow," she said. "Next time we're both in the neighbourhood I guess. Where're you headed, then? Untouched paradise or post-Atomic hellhole?"

"Neither," Daniel assured her. "It's a diplomatic first contact on an industrial world."

Amy shrugged. "Sounds easy enough. What's the place called?"

"Kelowna."


End file.
